


this is not a romance

by Ark



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: All of the things, Anal Sex, Bottom Loki (Marvel), Bottom Thor (Marvel), Discussions of non-con, First Time, Fixes, Fluff and Angst, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Oral Sex, PWP, Pre-Thor (2011), Rimming, Seriously All of the Things, Sex Pollen, Top Loki (Marvel), Top Thor (Marvel), many times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 01:50:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13424169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ark/pseuds/Ark
Summary: “Brother, we must agree,” says Thor, “if we are to do this together.”





	this is not a romance

**Author's Note:**

> Infinite paeans of gratitude to the fiercest and funniest beta, [stuffimgoingtohellfor](http://stuffimgoingtohellfor.tumblr.com). Thanks to bewaretheides315 for encouragement, to freekicks for little spoon Thor, and to reserve for prompting pre-Thor sex pollen. Here is something like that.
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://et-in-arkadia.tumblr.com), probably trying not to reblog six Loki-related posts in a row.

The spell hits Loki full in the face, all blinding light. He expects pain but feels none, his body enveloped in sudden heat. 

It is not even unpleasant: something must have gone wrong with the casting, or perhaps Loki’s wards kept up well enough, though he has only just began to practice that advanced magic. When his vision clears, he finds that he has reeled, fallen back against the rough wall of the cave. 

To his right, a larger shape, red and gold: Thor is collapsed in a heap, knocked over entirely by the force of the spell. He’d thrown himself in front of Loki as soon as it became apparent that the sorcerer they pursued -- a craven thief who dared steal treasures from their father’s vault -- was preparing to send a blast in their direction.

 _Idiot,_ thinks Loki fondly, as he drops to his knees at Thor’s side. It is Loki who might have shielded them both from the spell if Thor let him take point. But Thor never thinks, only does. 

At least the magic proved harmless enough. Nothing too impressive but a flash and bang in the end, a temporary stunning to buy some precious time. To unbalance Thor is significant, Loki will give the thief that, but in the end it will only serve to thoroughly piss Thor off. Once he’s up and on his feet again, Thor will insist on going at double-speed until they track down the sorcerer and it is Thor doing the knocking sideways.

Loki shakes Thor’s wide shoulder, and then again when there is no response. “Brother,” he says at last, annoyed as Thor will be at the delay, and so he sends a hint of his own magic to wash over Thor -- just enough of a healing kick to bring Thor back to consciousness quickly. They haven’t the time for a concussion. 

Thor opens his eyes at once -- and all at once, his blue eyes are darkening by degrees. His gaze flicks up, down, side to side, and finally focuses on Loki’s face, and then, as Loki watches with a sudden thrill of horror and understanding, Thor’s eyes turn black.

Loki scrambles backwards, cursing. When he raises his hands in an attempt to shape futile runes in the air, Thor props up and turns to study him with obsidian eyes and an uncertain note in his voice. 

“Brother,” Thor says to Loki, “what’s happened to your eyes?”

Loki’s hands forget how to draw runes.

Loki has no looking-glass, but he knows that if he did, his own eyes would mirror Thor’s. Black, all black, as though there is nothing save pupil, the mark of a spell he recognizes now and trembles to name.

Loki tries to keep his voice calm. “Thor, listen to me. We were attacked with a significant sorcery. You must do as I say. Get up, and go from here at once. Go back the way we came. _Run._ You must run. Only time will break what binds us, but time will also make it worse--”

Thor is shaking his stubborn head. “I’ll not leave you unguarded for that villain to find, should he return to gloat at his aim in hitting us.”

“He’s not coming back,” Loki says with deadly certainty. “He has bought himself the distance he needs to get far away. Thor, please, you _must_.”

“Well.” Thor looks uncertain, like he might protest again; but Loki knows that magic unsettles him, and for once, Thor seems willing to defer to Loki’s expertise without further argument. “If you really think I must.” He gets to his feet, seeming only a little unsteady. “We will meet back at--”

Loki screams. The single step away that Thor took toward the cave mouth is agony. No, agony would be a welcome relief. The worst pain he has ever felt -- a wave of cutting and twisting and plunging heated knives from crown to toe -- washes over him until Thor freezes in place. From Thor’s ashen face, Loki knows that he felt the same. They're too late.

“The fuck,” says Thor, dangerously quiet, as though afraid a loud voice might set off the pain again, “was that.”

Loki squeezes his black eyes shut. Shakes his head.

“Loki. Tell me.”

“We’re bound,” Loki manages at last. He cracks an eye. The words spill forth somehow. “Bound together. It’s a bitch of a spell, an old one. I’ve only ever read about it before, once, in a crumbling book I wasn't supposed to read. I thought it mostly legend -- it takes a great deal of power and personal drain. The fox we were chasing was surely desperate. And vicious.” 

“Undo it,” says Thor, as though he has presented a simple knot for Loki to untie. He cannot see the complicated mass of ancient magics that now entwines them, slowly closing and gathering them into an ever-tighter net. 

“I can’t.” There are so many knots that Loki might spend a year picking them apart and not break them free of it. And they sorely lack a year.

Thor’s eyebrows shoot up. “Why not?”

“It doesn’t work like that. It only unravels with time, when its purpose is met.” Loki focuses on keeping his breathing even, and when he gestures, Thor takes the hint and, quite carefully, sits down beside Loki on the rocky floor. His proximity hits Loki like a healing balm, and leaves a greater warmth in its wake. Loki glances away, then back, unsure of where to rest his eyes. “It’s going to get worse before it gets any better.”

“I’m not afraid of pain,” Thor says, lifting his chin, “though I would have you never scream like that again.”

“The pain will only come upon us if we try to separate, or leave the place where the spell was cast.” He anticipates Thor’s next question. It will do no good, if they tie their legs together, as once they ran and won races at summer festivals, and try to walk free from here.

Thor considers this, shrugs. “Then we wait for it to pass.”

Loki says, quickly, to have it out: “This spell is a rare one, for there are few who would dare use it and face the repercussions thereafter. It is banned from books of repute. Some would say that a killing magic is kinder. Thor, it does not simply bind and hold us. It will change us. We will become beasts.”

Thor’s black eyes are narrowed. This is a province of magic he is none too fond of, which Loki supposes is mostly his fault. “ _Animals_?”

“Perhaps not quite as such.” Loki lets out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “Beasts in spirit. It will strip away all reason, will force us to act as we would not otherwise.” Now Loki must look away. He focuses on the dusty cave floor, where the imprints of their running boots pause halfway. “Beasts who rut. It will make us fuck before it runs its course. There is no other way to hold it off, and naught else that will gain our release.”

When Loki finally regains the courage to raise his eyes, Thor is staring at him in abject disbelief. “You jest.”

“Do I sound like I am jesting?” Loki snaps. “The spell is meant to be effective, incapacitating, and it is also intended to embarrass and malign its recipients. You and I might decide we could brave the pain together long enough to attempt an escape, to get help; but rutting beasts can do nothing but rut. Our sorcerer will have secured himself all the time he needs, and with it, our degradation.”

Thor blows out a shaky breath, and then he laughs -- a nervous laugh meant to emerge hearty. “Say what you will, Loki, tell me all your tallest tales. I will not be forced into _fucking my brother_.”

Loki twists his hands together in his lap. His knuckles blanch white from the pressure. “We don’t -- we will have no say in the matter.”

Thor snorts, still disbelieving. He cannot see the net cinch ever closer around them. “And if we do not, we will die, I suppose?”

“No,” says Loki. “But the pain will become so great we will wish for death, by the account I read. Death is the only solution besides time and acquiescence, and it is no sort of solution.”

For the space of several breaths they are silent. Then Thor says, broodily, with a sudden edge to his voice, “You think me stupid. You think you can fool me with such a prank as this. Well, I’ve seen through it. Enough games.”

Before Loki can stop him, Thor has pushed to his feet again, ignoring the hand that Loki throws up in panic as he takes a broad stride forward, then another.

It is excruciating. Loki screams again, and then he hears his scream break, for it has scaled too high. He falls back, his body convulsing, arching up from the ground; the knives are hot blunt pokers now, driving relentlessly into his flesh. There is no relief. It is so terrible that he realizes that he was wrong about solutions, and finds himself wishing for death, begging for it aloud, tears streaming from his eyes and soaking down into his collar. 

Dimly he hears Thor gasp and stumble. Then Thor turns around and falls to his knees beside him. Loki still writhes, until Thor’s hand lands heavily on his twisting hand. The pain recedes, but this time it does not stop entirely, only dulls -- it stays under Loki’s skin like the memory of a nightmare, ready to emerge again.

“Please,” he says, blinking up at Thor, “kill me. Death by your hand would be a comfort. I’ll not feel that again, Thor. I _won’t._ ”

“I’m sorry.” Thor’s face is a ghostly white; his eyes are only black. “Brother, forgive me. I should not have doubted you.” His hand moves from Loki’s hand up to touch his cheek, gently, once, then away. “I could no more kill you than I could cut out my own heart,” says Thor.

And Thor looks so wretchedly apologetic that Loki lets Thor help him back up to a sitting position, Thor’s grip strong on his arm. Loki doesn’t want to look at him anymore, at the unmoored expression on Thor’s face, but it’s hard to know where else to look.

Thor takes a deep, bold breath, and now, somewhat resolved, he is resolved to sound brave. “So -- so if, I were -- that is to say -- if I were to lie with you, we would be free of this?”

A strange sensation shivers down Loki’s spine, not all unpleasant. He lifts his shoulders. Shrugs, as though addressing a clinical problem, or a question of philosophy from one of his texts. “According to the account I read, yes. Eventually.”

“ _Eventually_?” 

“Like I said,” Loki says, miserable, “the spell only breaks with time, when its terms are satisfied.”

“And if we do not? If we resist?”

“Even now the net is cast around us, reduces the space we can be apart,” Loki says. He holds up an unsteady hand, palm open, then he closes his fingers. “The pain will come again, unrelenting, until at last our reason and our will are stripped away, and we do the spell’s bidding anyway.”

“It is a cruel bit of witchcraft,” says Thor.

“Yes.”

To Loki’s astonishment, Thor folds Loki’s hovering hand between his own. It is hard to look up into Thor’s black eyes, which seem a stranger’s, but the earnest expression on his face is so classically _Thor_ that Loki almost smiles. Thor’s touch feels cool on his flushed skin. 

“Brother, we must agree,” says Thor, “if we are to do this together.”

Loki’s eyes -- which also show as an uncanny black -- go round with shock. “You’d--?”

“ _We,_ ” Thor repeats. “I refuse to have this decision taken from us, to give up even that.” He swallows, visibly. His tone is trying to be brave again. “Certainly it is strange for us; but we have bled together, killed together, wept together, you and I; of all things can this truly be the worst fate we will face?”

Rendered speechless, Loki can only shake his head: no. No, it cannot. It is not.

“Then we are agreed?”

Loki nods. Slowly.

Even should the piercing, shrieking pain return just then, with its only relief found in Loki speaking a single word, he could not do so. Thor relinquishes his hand.

They sit in silence, looking at everything but each other: at the yawning mouth of the cave, the toothy stalactites poking down from above, the distant, far-away fields and roads to an escape that they cannot reach.

Then Thor says, so softly that Loki must tilt forward to hear him, “I have never lain with anyone before.”

Now Loki stares at his brother, in astonishment, and then with muddled skepticism. “But -- the Lady Sif?”

Thor has the grace to blush. “We are but great friends. The fiction of my favor satisfied us both.”

“But--” Loki’s mind reels, counting all of the fine and lovely young women he has seen tumbled on his brother’s lap at rowdy banquets and after: he has watched them. He has heard highborn daughters whisper to each other of Thor’s vigor and prowess, when they thought he was not listening, or maybe when they knew he was. 

And Thor, newly twenty, has been to war and back, and surely took shield-brothers there, as is the custom. A prince, with Thor’s bravery and Thor’s face, would have the pick of any man at camp to warm his tent at night. Thor has had the pick of anyone in Asgard since he came of age.

But why claim such a thing as virginity -- a clinging thing -- something all would have expected Thor to have left behind years ago -- if it were not true?

There is a odd but growing fire lit in Loki’s belly at the unexpected confession -- at the knowledge that against every seeming odd, he is to have Thor first. It too closely echoes a childish fantasy he long tucked away, and, he thought, quelled with time. 

The old, ravishing jealous not only _of_ Thor, but of _everything_ Thor, that used to consume him: Loki did not want Thor’s toy because he liked it better than his own, but simply because Thor was clutching it. He did not flirt with the first maiden to catch Thor’s eye, and try to kiss her before Thor could, because he liked her well; Loki tried because she had the audacity to draw Thor’s attention. He did not watch the Lady Sif through narrowed hawk’s eyes because --

Perhaps the jealousy is not so old and buried.

“Loki,” Thor is saying, still in that low, muted voice. “Have you?”

“I’m sorry?”

“With -- anyone,” and Thor makes a small gesture that is patently obscene. “I thought you might tell me of your own accord, one day; but I know also that you like to keep your secrets close when it suits you.”

“Oh,” says Loki, as though it matters not at all. He is definitely able to speak whole syllables. “That. No.”

“Oh,” says Thor, his voice gone even softer.

Then Loki bursts out laughing, because it is all absurd. “A fine pair of royal virgins we are,” he says, scornful. “Father would be _ever_ so disappointed. Remember how he told us he had his first woman as soon as he realized he could?”

“I do not care,” says Thor, slowly, as though he is arriving at a decision by increments, “what our father thinks.” Then he brings his mouth down on Loki’s.

By every measure it is a terrible kiss. Their teeth clash; their noses bump; their lips are dry; their frightened all-black eyes are open and watching each other.

This will never work, thinks Loki wildly, and for a moment, he sees the haze ahead of them of pain, nothing but pure pain and savagery.

He shoves Thor back: not to repel him, but for breathing room. “What in Hel was that?” Loki demands.

Thor stares him down. “How else are we to begin?”

Loki rubs his temple. There is a headache descending, fast and swift; he can feel the buzz and pulse of sinister magic getting close, too close; but if they proceed under Thor’s direction they might as well wait until they are beasts or worse. 

“Must I do _everything,_ ” Loki sighs. He cups Thor’s chin in his hand, gently, then moves their faces close. Their noses touch, but do not bump: Loki wets his lips with a flicker of his tongue that draws Thor’s eyes to his mouth; then he kisses Thor with just the slightest hint of pressure. Pressure, then away, then back, teasing, light. He closes his teeth on Thor’s lower lip, but does not bite; he simply suggests to Thor that he could.

This is much, much better. This is -- exceptionally better. It should feel bizarre, and wrong, Loki knows, to do this with his brother; but instead it feels like the first time they went on a proper adventure, freed from the palace and finally unchaperoned, with only the excitement of the open road ahead of them.

Thor makes a startled sound, and Loki parts his lips to swallow it; and when he does, Thor, seeming to act on instinct, dares to introduce his tongue to Loki’s mouth. Loki meets him, and pushes back, to show that small, delicious darts of tongue are better than an ungainly incursion, and Thor learns quickly enough. 

All at once his big hand is on Loki’s lower back, fingers spread, and the other travels into Loki’s hair; and Thor deepens the kiss from exploratory to intimate, bringing their bodies flush together.

 _Oh_ , thinks Loki. 

When he and Thor are touching, the threat of the webbed magic feels somewhat paused, though Loki can feel it tightening its grip on them even as Thor’s hand twists, tight, in his hair. 

Loki knows he must speed them, but Thor holds him too close. When Loki tries to lean back in order to breathe, Thor ducks down and kisses him breathless, in just the manner Loki has shown him.

FInally -- it takes so long that Loki has begun to feel the sharp claw of the magic on his neck -- he pulls bodily away, and Thor at last relinquishes him. 

“Good,” Loki says, concisely, trying for steadiness. “That’s fine. That will do.”

“Will it?” Thor smiles, and now his black eyes dare to let him look mischievous. Then his brow furrows, and his smile, which was more than a little cocky, flattens. “How did you learn to do that?”

“I picked it up,” says Loki, fully enjoying himself for the first time since he was hit with a faceful of this thrice-damned spell, “here and there. Why, are you very jealous, Thor?”

To his surprise, Thor appears to consider this, thinking through his thoughts in that entirely too-sincere fashion that drives Loki mad and has done since they were small.

Then Thor says, “Yes, I think I am. Very jealous.”

Loki goes still. “Why?”

This time Thor’s response isn’t slowly worked out and puzzled through. He seems to answer on instinct alone. “Because you belong to me,” he says simply.

Loki stares at him. That’s when Thor’s mind appears to catch up with his mouth again, and a red flush soon marks him. “I didn’t intend, that is,” Thor starts, then stops, “I only wished to--”

“Stop talking now, brother,” says Loki, slipping his arms around Thor’s neck. “For once I know exactly what you mean.” 

“Ah, Loki--”

This time Loki bites Thor’s lower lip. The magic is pressing down around them like a heavy curtain, and will start to suffocate them soon enough. He tries to spur Thor to action, and it works; Loki’s teeth drag on his lip before at last letting it go, and then Thor is whispering tremulously in Loki’s ear, “Can you make us bare?”

It’s an excellent plan, ingenious, really, and Loki is rather annoyed that Thor thought to suggest it first. Distracted, he’s much too distracted. Loki has never been so removed from certainty of thought or action. He nods his head to clear it.

Their hunting leathers and light armor comprise a maze of ties and buckles and lashes that they would struggle with unsteady hands to undo. But Loki closes his eyes, and focuses stubbornly on the idea that he and Thor must be unclothed, and then he feels the sudden coolness on his skin at the same moment that Thor loudly exhales, as though all of the air has been sucked out of him.

Loki opens his eyes. They are, indeed, bare, but he is disappointed to find their clothing strewn about the cave, and not in the neat piles he tried to construct in his mind’s eye. He’ll need more practice. 

He scowls at his helm, which has been tossed ten feet away, until Thor’s hand curving around the back of his neck brings him abruptly back to the present.

Ah, yes: a torturous net of magic. The agreement to have each other rather than be had by the spell. Thor, nude and broad and so perfectly striking that Loki bites his own lip. Thor is kneeling naked across from him with wondering black eyes.

He has never seen Thor’s erect cock before, though not, he’ll admit, for a lack of interest in how it might grow from what he _has_ seen often enough while swimming or bathing. Loki is not disappointed. 

There is not a person in nine realms who would be disappointed, for Thor is thickly made, and so long that Loki thinks that any jaw would ache with an attempt to swallow him down, and surely no throat could ever manage the whole thing. He is dismayed by the sudden and swift and then all-consuming desire to try. He shuts his mouth, which he is afraid fell open at the sight. 

Thor is hard already, roused by a few seeking kisses: impressive, really, even more so when he keeps himself still as Loki’s curious hand reaches out to try and wrap around the base. Then, they both shiver; then, Loki hears Thor say, “ _Brother_ ,” and he feels the impossible, excellent glove of Thor’s hand around his own cock. 

Loki notices, as though from far away, his own nudity, his own hard and straining cock, not quite so massive an instrument but, he has always liked to think, proudly shaped to please. He considers whether they might just stay like this, thighs pressed, hands gripping each other, gazes locked; but the spell is weaving ever over them, gathering up its threads, and Loki can feel the ache of pain under his skin warring with the throb of newfound pleasure. 

Still, they stay like that a moment, shakily stroking and exploring with hesitant hands that grow slowly bolder by degrees. It becomes a challenge between them soon enough, a race to see who can do better at this. Of course it would be Thor who would fast uncover just how to touch him, Loki thinks, Thor who has a lived a lifetime watching Loki’s reactions to best learn how to goad and please him. Thor who knows his every weak spot when fighting and also all of his strengths. 

But Loki knows the same about his brother, and he soon deciphers what will elicit a shuddering reaction from Thor: a firm, unrelenting hold on his cock, yet softer on the upstroke, with a circling of Loki’s thumb around its proud head that is so slowly sketched as to be both teasing and tender. Thor shudders.

“Loki,” he murmurs, and Loki has the passing thought that if Thor’s eyes were not already black with magic, they would be darkening with lust. 

Loki shudders.

He can feel the magic snapping shut, no longer a net but a spiked cage, and a sudden harsh bloom of pain shoots up the column of his spine. Thor’s jaw clenches, and Loki sees that he has felt it too. 

“We must hurry,” Loki says, his parted lips flattening into a line. “We’ve dawdled long enough.”

Thor nods resolutely. Then he says, “If I could, I would have us stay like this a while.”

Loki says nothing. So Thor nods again, even more resolute, though his expression is struck by too many questions. “How should we--?”

Loki still says nothing. His mouth feels full of sawdust, and he has never been so out of his depth. 

At least Thor seems to have retained the ability to speak. “Perhaps,” he ventures, voice low again and almost delicate, “perhaps, astride me? The discomfort might be less, if you maintained the pace.” Loki says nothing, and Thor seems to interpret this as refusal. “Or,” Thor offers, “we could -- I could take you fast, in the accustomed manner, so that it might be over quickly.” Loki stays silent, and Thor’s eyebrows knit together in confusion. “Or--”

Loki’s mind is reeling with the suggested imagery, living for a thousand years in each conjured scene. But when he regains the power to produce words, he cannot resist a scathing attack on Thor’s presumption.

“So,” Loki says, his voice a sharpened blade, “it has been decided that you will fuck me, has it? I was not invited to that committee. But of course it makes sense, considering that one of us is strong and never not a man, and the other, weak enough to need magic and sometimes something else, and what everyone calls unmanly--”

“No.” Thor looks horrified. Thor looks far more horrified than he had when Loki told him the means to the spell’s end. “Loki, no. I never. I never thought -- I apologize. It was a manifestation of a desire I had, only, and I spoke out of course. Should you but say so -- I will gladly reverse. There is no shame to it. I would welcome you.”

Loki lives for another thousand years, perhaps seven thousand, in this abrupt and most unexpected suggestion. Gooseflesh breaks out across his body, and beads of sweat from his brow. But he has not missed the phrasing Thor used. The sawdust washes from his mouth under a swallow. He feels himself stepping far over every boundary line as he speaks again. 

“You have had,” Loki says, his voice now as hushed as Thor’s, “a desire. To have me?”

“Yes,” Thor answers, unimpeachably honest. 

“How long?”

Silence descends more heavily than the treacherous magic, threatens to strangle them. This honesty from Thor takes longer to solidify, seems to fight through hesitation and many concealed layers. 

Thor says, “Forever.”

Loki breathes in. Out.

The creased distress on Thor’s face shows that his brother anticipates anger from Loki, or disgust, or the two co-mingled. But Loki, suffused with warmth and the greatest relief he’s ever known, can only reach out a purposeful hand and close it over the back of Thor’s neck, as Thor had brought him back to the present moments before. Loki is trembling as he brings their foreheads together to touch. 

“You do not hate me,” says Thor, sounding amazed.

“No,” says Loki. “No, not at the moment,” and Thor lets himself laugh a little.

“You are not repulsed,” says Thor, studying Loki’s face.

“No.”

“Will you tell me the reason, brother?” If Thor’s eyes were not black, Loki imagines they might show something bright and terrifically hopeful.

“Because,” says Loki simply, before he kisses Thor again, “you belong to me.” 

Then they are crushed skin-to-skin from neck to knee without hesitation, and with palpable hunger, and Loki astonishes them both by gasping into Thor’s mouth when Thor’s arms come all the way around him.

“Please,” Thor says when he can breathe again, panting with realized need and with the weight of the pressing pain that has spread from spine up into their shoulder blades. “Loki, tell me how you would have us proceed--”

It is so generously offered now that Loki is feeling generous, and then decided. He pulls himself from Thor’s embrace, this time with great difficulty, and turns. He tries to make the motion look graceful, though he is sure Thor can read how tense his muscles are. 

Loki is already kneeling: it is an easy enough thing to go down onto his hands, facing the jagged wall of the cave instead of Thor. It will go smoother for them both, he thinks, if they do not have to gaze on each other throughout, for all that Loki wants to gaze. This is, he has read, how it is done amongst warriors, which should please Thor.

And like this, Loki can turn his head, as he does now, and cast a look over his shoulder that anyone would take as an invitation. All at once Loki understands the phrase _come hither_.

Thor looks down at him, meets Loki’s eyes. He sucks in such a breath that the infinite span of his chest seems to double in size. “Then -- like this?” His hand ghosts up Loki’s side, to settle over his hipbone like a handle. “You’d let me--?”

“It is a desire I have had,” Loki answers, feeling that for once, Thor has earned the truth from him, if they are to get through this alive and intact. Then he turns his head back to face the wall. Squeezes his eyes shut. “Like this should be most expedient for -- for a first time. At least, I have read as much.”

“Ah, is _that_ what you are always reading about.” Thor reaches for him now with two hands, the heat from his thighs riding up the back of Loki’s legs as he settles in behind him. Even so resolved, Loki’s back arches in shock when Thor parts his cheeks, when Thor’s thumb traces gently over the puckered skin that he finds there.

“I will hurt you,” Thor says then, and he sounds so mournful that Loki winces, half in annoyance and half pleased that the thought is such a wound to Thor.

“I heal quickly,” Loki manages. “The pain can be nothing compared to what we have already shared.”

“Even so,” says Thor, and now the note of too much thinking is in his voice again, the machinery that strains to arrive at a decision. 

Then, all at once and without any warning save the displacement of air, his mouth -- Thor’s _mouth_ \-- is upon Loki’s entrance, all wet heat, and his tongue is seeking, then gaining admission into his body.

Loki cannot help it: he tosses his head and cries out, and Thor’s tongue presses deeper. Loki scrabbles for purchase on the ground where there is none. He’d girded himself for a harsh and unrelenting thrust of Thor’s cock -- not _this._

Not this, not if he had a million years to think about it, not Thor’s soft and suctioning mouth, not Thor stretching and slicking him inside with a tongue far more dexterous than he’s ever put to use in speech. Now Loki groans, but to show Thor he is not displeased, he rocks on his haunches and takes more of him.

Perhaps it is an animalistic enough show, for the magic around them stops in its descent as Thor licks and tongues him open, his strong fingers pulling Loki farther apart so that he might plunge further, and Loki shuddering and pushing back helplessly beneath him. 

How long it lasts Loki cannot say, for he has never known a greater or more invasive pleasure, and the knowledge that it is Thor behind him and Thor’s tongue twisting within him raises Loki to such heights that he is only vaguely aware that Thor has taken Loki’s cock in hand as well. 

He is much more keenly aware of it when he shudders past the precipice without the usual build or warning, shaking completely apart in Thor’s doubled hold on him. Ecstatic release washes over Loki, mercurial in nature, changing all of his tightly-held muscles into so much jelly, turning his tension into looseness, so that he can feel, through the haze of it, Thor’s tongue pierce him ever deeper. 

Thor’s hand is also busy -- and it is, Loki realizes, working so cleverly and to such a crafty end that Loki cannot believe he is not the one who organized the ploy: Thor’s fist and fingers catch and gather every drop of Loki’s spend. Only once this is done does Thor slowly disengage from him, as though reluctant to do so.

Then, before Loki can process the loss of such penetrative heat, Thor slides two well-slicked fingers inside him -- slicked from Loki’s own spill, a fact so filthy and so alluring that Loki’s hands give out, and he goes down to his elbows, his head hanging low. Thor’s fingers combined are the size of a well-made cock, and Loki cries out again, then again, as Thor’s turning wrist bids him to take them.

On and on with Loki all trembling limbs racked with pleasure and growing need that rises faster than he would’ve imagined was possible, as Thor fucks him with two, then three fingers, rough about it now, as though the more careful quest of his tongue is a forgotten memory. 

Loki cannot gather himself together long enough to glance over his shoulder, to see what Thor’s face looks like, though he can tell from his brother’s uneven breath that any barriers of restraint are fast wearing away. Whether it is the spell upon their necks or their bodies’ unique magic together, Loki does not know nor frankly care.

“How…” Loki tries, wonders if, after all, Thor’s plea of virginity is a lie -- a story put forth to make Loki feel more at ease, perhaps. Or perhaps Thor even somehow knew that it would excite Loki in ways long left unexamined, to hear that Thor took no other before him, that Loki would be the first. 

No virgin, thinks Loki, smarting at falling for a deception from Thor of all people, would think to use his tongue as such, or his hand and Loki’s slick in such a way, or -- “How did you know how to…”

“I may not be well-read as you are, brother,” Thor says, his voice so deep and desperate with lust now that Loki thinks he can hear an answering rumble of thunder roll overhead. “But men at war, in their tents and cups at night, speak freely. I learned many things by staying quiet, and listening, and sometimes, by asking questions.”

Loki struggles to process this, to accommodate the stretch of Thor’s fingers, to know where to put the sudden burst of joy at realizing that Thor had not lied to him after all. 

The joy infuriates him, to find himself so easily mastered; and so Loki says, taunting, “And when you took yourself in hand thereafter, with all your acquired knowledge, did you often think of me?”

“Yes. I did.”

“Your own brother,” says Loki, humming, relishing this newfound leverage. “How tortured you must have been.”

“Yes. I was.”

“Surely you considered that I might resist,” says Loki, biting hard on his lip when these words cause Thor’s fingers to curl and ignite sparks within him. “Did you imagine, then, what it might be like to force me?”

“Yes.” It is a credit to Thor’s fortitude -- and perhaps the strength of his interest -- that his hand’s motion does not falter. “Only sometimes. I much preferred to think that you were willing.”

“Not that you could hold me down and take all that you wanted?” Oh, this is surely one of the finest moments of Loki’s life; no, the finest; if the sorcerer were to reappear at the cave mouth now Loki would throw him a parade. “That you would seize me while I struggled, as I looked up at you in shock and betrayal, and that you would _possess_ me, Thor? That you would fuck me again and again, make me yours, even as I begged for you to consider what you were doing? That you would--”

“Loki,” says Thor, cutting as the edge of his sword, and yet also somehow, damn him, amused: “It seems that those may be your thoughts more than mine. If that is what you want of me, you will have it.” 

Loki loses the thread. “No, I -- I -- did not mean --”

“Let us be ourselves, then, and not overheated visions, or automatons to a petty magician’s malice,” says Thor, taking free his fingers. “Give me leave, brother, and I will sheath myself in you, and see if a thing that I have guessed at is correct, and you were made to fit me.”

“Oh -- fuck,” says Loki eloquently. He throws a look of furious, inflamed need back over his shoulder, and then he sees that for all the confidence of Thor’s speech, his brother is a mess: face deep red from holding back, his muscles bunched and quivering, his cock rock-hard and leaking and leaking. 

Thor’s mouth twitches, fighting off a grimace, and now Loki can see -- he was distracted -- that the net of magic is upon Thor’s shoulders, and it must be a painful struggle indeed to not give in to its whispered commands to be brutal. Loki can hear the magic all too well, and it would have him beg to be torn apart.

“I give you leave,” Loki says instead. “Now go to, before I change my mind.”

Thor does not need to be told twice. His eagerness betrays him, for his hand is unsteady on his own cock as he lines it up; and then Loki loses the power of observation as Thor breaches him in a single, focused thrust. 

Thor does not stop until he is all the way seated, though Loki gasps and curses him, and even tries, unconvincingly, to move away when it builds towards being too much, but Thor’s hands are locked onto Loki’s hips and do not let him go. In the end, Loki gets his struggle, and Thor his ready sheath, and both of them are moaning by the time that Thor is still again.

Loki finds the strength to push himself back up from elbows to his hands; the angle is too deep to bear otherwise, though he’ll not tell Thor that. Thor’s thorough preparation, he realizes, was important, for otherwise he might be weeping instead of grinding his teeth and shivering all over as his body adjusts, though he’ll not tell Thor that either.

Behind him Thor is holding himself quietly in place, as though he, too, is surprised by the irresistible momentum of his first incursion.

“Do you intend to move or stay?” Loki hisses, when he can speak. “Or are you quite broken?”

Thor pets a soothing hand down Loki’s spine, and Loki grunts and refuses to respond to it, as though he were an unruly cat that might be tamed; but when Thor does so once more he closes his eyes. Then Thor’s weight settles heavy across Loki’s back, and Thor is kissing his neck. 

Thor murmurs into his ear: “How tight you are around me, brother. How well you hold me.”

Loki has no time for Thor’s chivalrous nonsense. They aren't in a poem or a wedding bed. “Anyone might,” he says, wanting to sneer, keen to puncture Thor’s ridiculous romanticism. But the scorn and the words die on his lips as soon as he speaks them. Thor hears him falter. 

“Are you sure?” Thor draws himself out, almost entirely back out, then slides back into Loki with the exact sustained motion that he returns his sword to its scabbard after a triumphant battle. “Are you quite sure of that, Loki?” 

Loki is hardly breathing, though he needs breath to survive this -- Thor’s words are as much of an onslaught as his cock.

“Do you really think,” Thor is saying, on another thrust, faster this time, as though to punctuate his point. “Do you really think a mere mortal could take all of me at once, or at all? Do you think I could seat myself in any other Asgardian, and not have them cry hold?”

How Loki hates him right now, with almost the exact force of wanting him. “You are a -- a pompous, pretentious peacock,” he says, quite proud of the alliteration, for his head is beginning to fill with stars. “Is that what you think? That your sex is as mighty as your hammer, and must be wielded with equal prudence? What a vain and -- ah -- ah -- _yes,_ there, do that once more -- what a vain and self-important creature you are, Thor. No wonder no woman would take you to bed. Women see through such conceited delusion, they are accustomed to men posturing to conceal their inadequacies--”

“I would have none of them,” Thor says, and since Loki is riding back against him now with every enthusiasm, his fingers close possessively at Loki’s waist. He seems to be measuring how far his fingers can span. On this thrust Thor slams himself home. “Have we not established that it was your face that rose up before my eyes, when I took myself in hand?”

“Oh, how noble,” says Loki, panting, as Thor’s cock strikes again at the spot within him that introduces electricity into his blood. “Behold Thor, God also of fertility, who stayed a virgin because he could not fuck his brother. Fuck. _Fuck._ ” Thor keeps his momentum aimed exactly right, and his rhythm is hard now, very hard, and unflagging. “Do you think the bards will sing of this, brother?” 

“In time, perhaps.” Thor doesn’t even pretend to sound taken aback, and oh, how Loki _hates_ him. Thor sounds calm amidst his exertion, the clear-eyed confidence that overtakes him in a fight. “When I am King.”

“Don’t be stupider than usual, you sanctimonious fool -- yes, _yes,_ that’s it right there, go faster. Ah. Ah. _Thor._ You. You haughty popinjay. You arrogant, conceited, empty-headed brute. Ah--”

“Such tender words from your lips, Loki,” says Thor with laughter in his voice. When they escape this murderous spell Loki is going to murder him. Slowly. “You have called me far worse. Perhaps you are distracted.”

“I am going to _finish_ you--”

“No,” Thor says, with a meaningful roll of his hips. “I believe that pleasure to be mine. Again.”

“Of course you would wish to fuck _me_ , who would be unable to gossip about your inexperience and ineptitude,” Loki spits out, attempting another path of insult, all of him arching upwards when Thor moves to take Loki’s cock in hand. Thor’s hand tightens to find Loki hard once more, and he begins to jerk him even as he thrusts. 

Thor is not so coordinated at this; understandable, Loki will allow, since he has never done so before; but Loki does not say so, and it still feels better than he will ever account. 

Loki says, instead, “No mortal or anyone on Asgard would abide what an absolutely witless barbarian you are in bed, a vacuous, vulgar -- _fuck me_ , by every God, don’t _stop_ , that’s it, fuck -- Thor--”

“Like this?” Thor asks, and he fills Loki with so much cock there’s nothing else that matters and no way back, Loki thinks in a mild state of panic, there will never be another cock for him like this one -- _just like this_ \--

Loki breaks into many pieces. He won’t give Thor the satisfaction of seeing him shout about it, so he rides the exquisite crescendo, and then the descent from it into pure and pulsing pleasure, and he doesn’t say a word. He’s said enough words for now. He bites the inside of his cheek so hard it bleeds. 

But since Thor has worked diligently, Loki will give him that, Loki tosses his head and looks over his shoulder at Thor just as his second spend is trickling wet across his belly and all over Thor’s hand. 

When Loki locks his own black eyes with Thor’s, and deigns to smile just a little, Thor shudders and seems closer to the edge than when Loki clenched up on his cock -- which he does again for good measure.

Thor is a sight. His superb form, his fine and powerfully built limbs, all of him gleams all over with sweat: the heroic statuary of his body has its marble buffed to a shine. Sweat soaks his long hair, dulling the gold there, but making him look like an athlete who has won at every race, and the proud carriage of his shoulders makes it seem that he is wearing the armor of a triumphant warrior. 

Thor says, breathing fast, “Loki, _may_ I.”

Loki considers turning down the request. What will Thor do then, but be forced to pull out, to grapple desperately in his own grip, while Loki watches grinning, his eyebrows up. 

The idea of it is delicious, sustaining; but the idea of it is enough. Knowing that Thor would do so if Loki so ordered is enough. And anyway, the spell that binds them is satisfied by carnality: perhaps it will not be satisfied otherwise.

Loki tilts his head, still watching over his shoulder. “You may,” he says, magnanimous, “but you must speak your way through it. Tell me exactly what you intend.” 

Thor pulls back, then drives in again, a muscle jumping on his cheek. “I have not a way with words as you do.”

“Try,” says Loki. “I’ll help you if you like.”

Thor nods frantically, his hands again holding Loki’s hips for purchase. He’s clearly trying hard not to give over into total rut to seek his release, clinging onto control with his fingernails.

“Are you close, Thor?” Loki asks.

“Yes. Gods, yes.”

“Tell me what you wish to do.”

“I…” Incredible that a mere attempt at description should make Thor blush scarlet, when Loki’s knees are scraped raw from the unbridled nature of their fucking. “I want to spend. Within you. I want to, badly. I want to keep myself in you, and feel you take it.”

Despite his attempted aloofness, Loki shivers at that, and Thor must surely feel it. Because then Thor says, as though his tongue is loosened, “I want to leave such a mark that no one else can see, but you will know. Even once we escape this place, you and I will know. Tonight, and every day thereafter, if you refuse me, if you do not let me seek your bed again, still you will bear the echo of how I have had you, Loki. How I was the first.”

“Oh,” says Loki quietly, and he lets Thor angle him downward, take him deeper. It’s considerably more than he was expecting to hear confessed. He hasn’t been able to think beyond their immediate problem, the question of the menacing magic, and how to confound it; he’s delighted in teasing Thor, and testing the limits of this newfound dynamic, but Loki is not considering tonight, or any of their days after that. He gasps, oversensitized now, as Thor thrusts hard and fast, and even further inside him than he has reached before.

Thor is starting to lose his rhythm, starting to utterly unravel, but still he talks through it, for Loki bid him to: “You will not believe me if I say that you feel perfect, if I tell you that being in you is better than any victory or any dream I have ever had. I know how you dislike shows of sentiment, how you roll your eyes at romance. But know this, brother: I was right, and you were made to fit me. Now that I know, I will have no other. I give myself over to your keeping,” and Thor, always too literal, matches words to action, and that is when he holds himself pressed as far into Loki as he can, and spills and spills and spills as though he might keep going without end. 

Thor’s fingers flex and dig into Loki’s thighs, sealing Loki to him, making Loki take it, and Loki takes it and takes it; his eyelids flutter shut and he bows his head and breathes shallowly. He tries hard not to moan as the force of Thor’s possession thrills through him, and fills him entirely, but Loki is new to this, too, and it is all quite overwhelming. He thinks some slight sound escapes his lips, but by then he is quite beyond caring.

Thor is murmuring his name like it is a profound, sacred word to say, and when finally he is spent, and no longer pulses so insistently in Loki’s depths, Thor quiets. He does not pull out, however, but moves to stretch them sideways on the floor, rolling Loki with him, holding Loki’s back to his chest and running his hands over every inch of Loki that he can reach. Loki lets him, for a little while, too spent himself to protest. At least like this he needn’t have to gaze into Thor’s eyes and argue with his adoration. 

But the thought of eyes sparks Loki back into a kind of consciousness. He cants his head so that he can see Thor, and Thor uses this as an excuse to kiss him; Loki breaks free eventually. Then Loki says, his voice wavering, “Your eyes are still black.” Liquid pools of fathomless dark regard him. Loki swallows. “And mine?”

“Black,” confirms Thor, his lips moving against Loki’s brow. “I would say that they suit you well, to match your raven hair, if I did not know them caused by fell magic.” 

Loki blows out a breath of pure frustration. When he looks with his second senses, he can see the bars of containing magic surrounding them -- not with as much encroaching force, but still present and inescapable. “I don’t understand. We should have won our release.”

“Does the spell yet bind us?” Thor asks, now distractedly kissing Loki’s ear, as though he is no longer inclined to mind the terms of their imprisonment.

“Stop that,” Loki says without heat. “I need to think.”

Thor does not stop, but kisses down Loki’s neck. He comes dangerously close to sucking a bruise where no visible bruise should be, then course-corrects and keeps going until he’s kissing Loki’s shoulder. “Eventually,” Thor says.

“What?”

“You said that it would let us free _eventually_. Perhaps we have not satisfied its terms yet.”

Loki closes his eyes, tries not to spin into outrage when he realizes that Thor may be right. “Two virginities,” he says, his voice rising, as if flinging what they have done at the net around them will cause it to give, “and enough fucking that I will be sore for a _year,_ and it’s not _satisfied_?”

“It seems that way,” Thor says, sounding so unworried that Loki considers delivering a sharp elbow to Thor’s ribs. “Should we try again?”

Then Loki does elbow him, but Thor’s chest is like armor unto itself, and absorbs the blow easily enough. Loki says, “You couldn’t possibly--”

Thor is already stirring within him, growing hard as he follows his suggestion into action, and then he sets his teeth into the meat of Loki’s shoulder and bites. Loki exclaims, and his traitorous body starts to respond in kind.

There’s nothing else for it, nothing else to try. Loki says, long-suffering, “Fine. Have your fill, then, while you can.”

Thor moves quickly. He pulls out of Loki, only to settle Loki on his back. He kisses Loki’s knees when he finds them scraped, then parts Loki’s thighs and levers himself between them. 

Loki is open now, well-stretched and slick with wet from their first time. Thor slides back inside him easily, with a little grunt of pleasure at the sensation of this new angle. Thor starts to fuck him, but much too slowly, and with far too much care, and when he tries to kiss Loki, Loki turns his head aside.

“Have I upset you, brother?” Thor wants to know. 

“It’s more that I’m curious as to what the fuck you think you are doing,” Loki says, “ _brother._ This isn’t one of the songs that you like so well, about princesses rescued from monsters by strapping heroes and how the two go off hand in hand. The villain won. We were beaten. And this --” he gestures between them, their joined bodies. “--this is not a _romance._ You asked if I would refuse you, should you seek my bed tonight. Well, I would. I will.”

He expects Thor to be hurt. He _wants_ Thor to hurt. He expects anger, sourness, even violence in response. Instead Thor, Gods damn him all the way to Hel, only looks as close as Thor gets to contemplative, his brow furrowing. He doesn’t cease the motion of his hips, the inward drive of his thrusts. He almost looks as though he might try to kiss Loki again, kiss him quiet, but thinks better of it.

“Do you bar me from you bed because you do not want me there, or because of who we are?” Thor asks. “Those are two very different things.”

“Of course it’s because of who we fucking are,” Loki snarls, only belatedly realizing that by making this statement he is, in fact, confirming that Thor might otherwise warm his bed. He splutters, attempts recovery: “Have you no shame?”

Thor presses his lips together. “You have told me often enough that I do not.” As though to emphasize this point, Thor refuses to be provoked. Instead he increases his pace, and when Loki chews on his lower lip and does not respond, Thor hooks Loki’s legs over his shoulders and achieves an impossible angle, impossibly deep. “I have honor. I live by that.”

“And where,” Loki wonders, trying not to groan, “where in your credo does it give instructions for the proper etiquette when _fucking one’s brother_?”

“Many a warrior takes his brother in arms as a lover,” Thor points out, after thinking it over a moment. “Such a thing only makes them fiercer on the battlefield, for who would not fight all the more bravely with his partner to protect and impress at his side?”

“We are _actual brothers_!” Loki says, practically shouting it because the way Thor’s cock is sparking inside him threatens to set him on fire. Perhaps it was not the best idea to have this debate with Thor between his legs, but there’s no helping it now. 

“Who better then, or more worthy, of my love? You know that Asgardian tradition never forbade this, and once encouraged it. ‘Royal blood to royal blood,’ as the song goes, and you sang that one to me yourself, Loki.” Thor seems pleased to have remembered this event of early youth, more pleased in his attempt to drive out all reason and common sense with the spectacular force of his thrusts. 

“I was trying to goad you,” Loki hisses, then hisses again when Thor reaches with his hand and teases Loki’s nipples, first one, then the other, rolling them between his thumb and forefinger. “ _Oh_ \--”

“And what of the Midgardian histories that we read, of Gods, all familiar, who mated one another as a matter of course?” Thor points out, suddenly the historian. He buries himself in Loki and refuses to move for so long that with a whine of frustration Loki must make his hips rise and fall to carry on their momentum. It feels extraordinary, rocking at his own pace against the breadth of Thor inside him, and too late Loki realizes that he is the one goaded now, and that he took the bait. 

“We are not on Midgard,” Loki manages between clenched teeth.

“We are not,” Thor agrees, and he grins to see Loki’s cock -- exhausted after two releases -- is filling again. Soon enough Thor’s hand is there, a warm fist around him, encouraging. “But we would be Gods there. We might do as we pleased.”

“We are _not_ going to Midgard,” says Loki. “At this rate we will never escape this wretched cave.” He puts his head back and quite howls at the spell-cage around them while Thor thrusts ever on: “Is this not _enough_?”

“Perhaps not,” says Thor, still much too calm about the whole thing, about _everything_. His hand on Loki quickens, and his hips angle forward. “Come for me again, brother. I wish to see your face this time as you do.”

“This is beyond all endurance,” Loki says, narrowing his eyes. But there’s no denying that it feels so exceptional that his body has little trouble obeying Thor’s commands. His flesh is sensitive and over-used, yet this only serves to intensify his plunge over the edge as Thor coaxes it from him. 

This time Loki spends across his already-slick belly and he cries out at the ecstatic pulse of it, and in total frustration, to have lost so much control over his body and to let Thor -- Thor, of all people -- exert such a power over him.

Thor watches him eagerly, head tilted like a bird’s -- a bird of prey, thinks Loki. He must like what he sees, for as Loki struggles to regain his escaped breath, Thor moves down until his body seals against Loki’s, their sweat-slick skin seeming to merge at every point of contact. 

On instinct Loki’s legs move to wrap around Thor’s lower back, anchoring him close; he hadn’t meant to do that but he does. Then Thor’s hand touches Loki’s cheek, Thor’s thumb is tracing the outline of Loki’s jaw, the slope of his nose, his lips. 

“You cannot be so stunning in your repose and tell me you are not intended for my bed,” Thor says, and Loki shocks himself by feeling a hot blush on his cheeks. “I won’t believe you.”

“You must,” Loki says, but his voice emerges little more than a whisper. Thor’s kiss covers it up entirely. 

Then Thor is saying, close to Loki’s ear, while his hips roll with a slow, unhurried rhythm, the curl and crash of waves: “Tell me, Loki, that you don’t wish to be secure in the knowledge that I am yours. Tell me you will not mind if I fill my rooms with a long line of lovers when we return. Tell me you will forget how this feels, and that you will take lovers also. Tell me that you will be untroubled if I never again seek your bed, never try again to make you mine. Tell me all of this is true, and I will obey you.”

Loki wants to spit anger, fury, sarcasm, cruelty. But the breadth of it is too breathtaking. Jealousy and desire are warring in him with propriety and protocol, and the battle is so unevenly matched that it never even reaches the playing field. He rages over it for a long time nonetheless, while Thor studies his face, and fucks him with patient, attentive focus, at though giving Loki the time to sort through it.

At last Loki says, very softly, “I cannot. I cannot tell you that.” 

Thor smiles, tries not to look too victorious. Then his mouth is open on Loki’s throat, tasting the salt of sweat there. “Speak it again,” he murmurs. “Say why.”

Loki closes his eyes. He knows the words Thor is after. “Because you belong to me, brother.” 

“And you, to me,” Thor says, and in a show of timing that is entirely unfair in its choreography he chooses then to spend deep within Loki, filling him with hot liquid heat and the weight of Thor absolutely everywhere. 

“I’d like to think that we would have come to this one day, spell or no,” Thor says, when he stops kissing Loki.

Loki feels his lip turning up into a wicked smile. His eyes are still closed. “Perhaps so. Perhaps not. Perhaps I would have continued to abstain and gone on ignorant of your perverse intentions, and driven you quite mad, until the madness overcame you and you took me all unawares, as I described before. Perhaps against the nearest wall, my clothing torn, for you could not even wait to have me in a proper bed, like the brute that you are.”

Thor’s lips, his teeth, are back on Loki’s neck, and his voice is low and it is dangerous. “Against a pillar in the palace, where anyone might discover us? Is that what you desire first when we return, Loki?” Considering the way that Thor’s cock is hardening again inside of Loki, unaccountably, for even flesh as resilient as Thor’s must require rest -- Thor quite likes the idea of it was well.

“Mmm,” Loki hums, noncommittal but confirming, until Thor’s statement brings him crashing back, and he opens his eyes to check Thor’s eyes: black, still black, black as earth buried deep underground that will one day press into a diamond. Loki lets out a long and rather detailed curse, drops his legs from their cinch around Thor, and stomps a furious foot on the ground. 

Thor withdraws from him reluctantly. He moves to sit beside Loki, but flinches as his skin encounters the net of magic, which is woven too close -- restricting even sitting-space now. Thor lies down next to him instead, turns on his side to look at Loki’s profile. His hand spreads itself across Loki’s slicked belly, a mess from three spends already, and Thor’s finger draws aimless lines there.

Loki means to dislodge Thor’s hand but the problem of the spell is too vexedly distracting. “It’s not possible!” he snaps, at the magic, at Thor, at himself. “We should have satiated it by now. What more could this damned bastard’s work want from us?”

Thor purses his lips, gone into his slow, careful thinking mode. “I suppose there is still a great deal more that we could do,” he says delicately, as though fully aware that this might not be well-received or a welcome suggestion to Loki.

Loki blows an errant bit of hair out of his eye with a well-aimed puff of breath. “I refuse to let him keep using us like this, like puppets on strings, guessing after the next movement. This must end.”

Thor puts up an eyebrow. “What do you propose?”

Loki is using his second sight to examine the magic around them. It’s far more tightly knotted now than it was when the trap was first sprung, and he knew himself outmatched. But the hours of this, and the exhaustion, and the frustration -- that even after all he and Thor have done here, have sacrificed of themselves, it is not enough -- this feeds the fires of his anger, which are always burning.

“I will try and use my magic to break us free,” he says to Thor. “I should have tried in the beginning. I showed cowardice, bending to its will. I was afraid of the pain.”

“But --”

“I am no longer afraid of it,” says Loki. He squints at Thor lying sideways. “Do you doubt I have the skill?”

“I understand little about how such magics work,” Thor says. “But I know what your tutors say, and what our mother says, that your potential is very great. I would have no other sorcerer at my side but you. Yet it was you who told me this is a treacherous spell, and quite old, and not something you had ever worked before.”

Loki dislikes having his own sound logic parroted back at him, though some of Thor’s words are flattering. “Even so. I must try.” He considers Thor a moment, then longer. Under second sight Thor crackles and churns with vital energy, a vast well of power. “Would you let me use some of your strength? There is much magic in you, for all that it goes untapped; together we might have a fighting chance.” 

He should have thought of this before, and broken them free, when the spell was weaker. But then all that has passed between them would not have passed. Given a rewriting of time, Loki isn’t sure which outcome he would prefer.

“Brother,” says Thor, so unspeakably sincere that it makes Loki’s teeth ache, “you may do anything you like with me.”

Loki nods, and since Thor’s generosity deserves it, he leans over and kisses Thor in thanks. It is terrifying to think that he could get used to this, this ready access and easy physicality with Thor, but now is not the time to dwell upon it. Once he has thoroughly tasted Thor’s mouth, he draws back, though he takes up Thor’s hand and laces their fingers together tightly. 

Then Loki slips into a light trance, the better to see the ebbs and flows of magic all around him. Thor is a pure light; the earthen energy of the cave is too stagnant to provide any kind of a boost, but it is good for grounding. The spell is all angry reds and putrid yellows, its threads most unattractively clashing. Its knots are formidable, but Loki has the fuel of impatience and outrage. And now he has Thor, who surely must be stronger than their cage. 

He works his own magic into a sort of cutting blade, sharp-edged with jagged teeth, then attacks the pulsating web around them, sawing, sawing. The effort it takes is incredible, drains him quickly, but he now he need only draw on Thor’s reserves and he is replenished, he is beyond replenished, he could do this forever. Loki saws away savagely, filled with a turbulent joy at their success when the first strings snap.

The backlash is so immense that Loki cannot even scream. Pain floods through him, he has never known anything but pain and never will. He is made of only agony, he is a thing comprised of ruin. 

Beside him Thor’s mighty body arches up as though struck by his own lightning, and Thor somehow still has the power to scream. He screams and screams, and Loki thinks: this is the last sound that I will hear before I die and it’s my fault. Most mercifully, he passes out.

“Loki, please,” Thor is saying. “Please, brother, please.” 

Something wet is trickling across Loki’s forehead. He doesn’t want to open his eyes, though. He feels so tired. His body is leaden and exhausted, and it has been used in strange ways. It is much better to sleep. 

But Thor won’t stop pleading, he’ll keep it up until Ragnarok, Loki thinks with a flash of annoyance. At last he lets his eyes blink open so that he can tell Thor right off. 

They are naked, and Thor has Loki’s body cradled against his massive chest. Loki head is tucked under Thor’s chin, and Loki’s brow is damp from the tears that seem wrenched out of Thor. The surface that they lie upon is cold and hard, and overhead arches the spiked grin of a cave. 

Loki remembers, in fits and starts, and then he wishes that he hadn’t. Sleep seems to have been the better option. 

“Stop your lament,” Loki says. His voice is a croak. “You’ll wake the dead like that.”

The sudden crush of Thor’s arms around him might actually kill him and reverse his statement. Finally Thor loosens enough that Loki can breathe. He is feathering desperate kisses into Loki’s hair. “Loki. Loki. You cannot know what I have suffered. Your skin went cold as ice, you hardly seemed to breathe, and would not wake--”

“How long?” Loki asks.

“I don’t know,” says Thor, still clutching at him. “Too long. An eternity. I thought you might never come out of it.”

“Well, here I am,” says Loki bitterly. “Your torturer, and a failure as a sorcerer. My hubris hurt us worse than the spell would have on its own.”

“What?” Thor angles Loki’s face up to look at him, black eyes into black eyes. “You think I care anything for pain, now that you are restored? I would have taken that agony a thousand times over instead of the moments when I thought you lost to me.”

“Hmph,” says Loki, but he lets himself be held. Then, before Thor can query about it, Loki describes what happened: the blade of magic, the sawing, the snapping, his idiocy in not realizing that the spell would protect itself and lash out like a wounded animal. Maybe a master sorcerer at the peak of his power could break free, but Loki is no master. Still -- “I only got so far as I did by drawing upon you,” he tells Thor, begrudgingly grateful. Curious, he asks, “Did it hurt?”

“Oh, no,” Thor is quick to say. “Indeed, that part was most enjoyable, feeling my vitality flood through you. But I--” Thor blushes, just a touch. “I fear I am somewhat weaker now than I would be otherwise. I doubt I’d be much use in a fight, at the moment.”

“That’s to be expected,” Loki tells him. Thor is holding him so close, and was so very panicked, and is weathering Loki’s failure and his own weakening so very well, that Loki turns his head and kisses the side of Thor’s neck. “Perhaps I did it all on purpose,” says Loki, lifting an eyebrow, trying for some degree of levity amidst this madness, “to have you at my mercy.”

“I was thinking that you should,” says Thor, not responding to the teasing save to stretch his neck to give Loki’s seeking mouth more access.

“You what?”

“Have me,” Thor states plainly. “I had some time to think on it between bouts of weeping over your lifeless form. It’s what we haven’t tried yet. You said the spell turns those who resist it into rutting beasts -- well, in the wild, both would have their chance, wouldn’t they?”

“I--”

“Don’t you want to fuck me, Loki?” Thor asks. Thor would not know subtlety if it struck him across the face.

But when he puts it like that -- yes, Loki does, Loki does exceedingly want to do so, and there’s no denying the way his body responds to Thor’s question. Loki shivers at the mere thought, and his cock, which is against Thor’s thigh, goes rigid with arousal. 

“I should think that settles it,” says Thor. He sounds extremely satisfied at having his theory won out. And satisfied at the idea of Loki --

“What if you are wrong?” Loki manages. “What if it accomplishes nothing?”

“Brother,” Thor says in a low voice that should not be at all enticing, considering their circumstances, and the fact that it is _Thor_. “I hardly think that it is nothing.” He wraps one big hand around Loki’s cock, and starts to stroke him to fullness.

“Let me,” says Thor, and when Loki does not protest, he rolls Loki onto his back, and moves down Loki’s body. Then he tries to take all of Loki’s cock into his mouth at once.

He chokes almost immediately, but soon recovers, and perseveres with aplomb. Loki watches his cock slowly swallowed down, inch by inch, Thor’s mouth and Thor’s throat hot and wet around him, Thor’s lips slick-shiny and stretched.

“Fuck,” Loki exhales. Perhaps it is the near-death experience, but he feels suddenly effusive, sly-tongued, ready to talk: perhaps it is Thor effectively gagged for once in his life that gives Loki the floor. “Look at you,” he says, and he puts up his hips to see if Thor can take more. Thor can. “You look very fine like this, Thor. You look as though you were born to suck my cock.”

Thor makes a soft, desperate sound, like a man drowning, but he does not pull back for air; he must want more. Loki reaches, and soon enough has a tight fistful of golden-blond hair in his grasp, which he pulls meanly, at the same moment that he lets his hips indulge in a thrust. He pushes even deeper into Thor’s mouth, and Thor’s eyelids flutter, and the noise he makes now around Loki’s cock reverberates through Loki’s entire body.

Then Thor does move back, but only so that he can lick and lavish attention at the head of Loki’s cock before swallowing him again, and Loki gives over a shocked groan. He pulls harder at Thor’s hair, to see that this time Thor takes him down much more quickly. That Thor looks hungry for whatever Loki will give him. 

“Asgard’s heir,” Loki pants, finding that he needs the narration, “on his knees, _begging_ for it. You know, I’ve reconsidered, and I think I will let you into my bed when we get home, provided that you always begin by kneeling for me.”

Thor chokes again, but this time it is on Loki’s words instead of his cock, and Thor works a desperate hand between his own legs; sucking Loki has made him hard again. He is jerking himself as Loki spreads his fingers along Thor’s scalp and tests a hint of pressure, considers what it would be like to press Thor’s head down, to take total control. Thor sucks him harder in response. 

Thor would let Loki do this, hold him at an angle and fuck into his mouth until Loki spills down his throat; Loki knows that absolutely, and the image of it will satisfy him for years. But they haven’t the time to test Loki’s theory, not if Thor is right about the need for reciprocity. With every reluctance, Loki drags Thor off of him by the hair.

Black eyes flashing, mouth wet and swollen, Thor looks now more like the god of debauchery than anything else, and Loki is seized by the desire to kiss Thor, to taste the proof of his own musk in his brother’s mouth. He pushes that away -- his cock is slick and straining from Thor’s efforts, and would be put to use. 

Thor had let Loki lead the way when it was his turn, had eagerly obeyed Loki’s instructions, and while Loki has no particular plans for the latter, the former seems only fair.

“Choose,” says Loki, feigning great equanimity. And since he longs to say the words aloud: “How is it that you want me to fuck you, Thor?”

To Loki’s surprise, Thor doesn’t hesitate, but moves to lie beside Loki, then turns so that Loki is left staring at the vulnerable wall of Thor’s back. Thor appears to have thought about it -- thought it over, and landed here. He looks over his shoulder at Loki, almost shy. Almost, and not at all. “Like this.”

Loki blinks at him as he also turns, pressing close to Thor and molding his body into the S shape that Thor has assumed. He doesn’t mean to, but he finds himself running a hand down Thor’s flank, enjoying the impressive play of muscles, while he considers the positioning. 

Something stirs in Loki that he doesn’t have a name for: Thor would trust him like this, would show Loki his back as though Loki has never tried to stab it. Thor waits to receive him without any view of the process nor method of control. It is, for lack of any other way to quantify it, _touching_. 

On another day, in another place, Loki might sneer at such a misguided display of weakness, but now he does not. No, he slips his arm under Thor’s neck, where it can fold comfortably around Thor’s chest, to pull him closer. Then Loki says, against the back of Thor’s neck, his curiosity piqued, “Why like this?” 

It certainly won’t be the easiest or most comfortable for a first time. Loki, now the more experienced of their pair after the last few hours’ activities, knows that well enough.

“I like to think,” says Thor quietly, “that like this you can whisper all your plots into my ear, and not have to strain yourself.”

Loki is startled into a laugh, but it fades quickly when Thor reaches behind him and takes hold of Loki’s cock, as though he will do this himself if Loki does not go to. 

“Just -- just fuck me,” Thor says. “I’m ready. I want to feel you. Please.”

Loki has sucked a finger into his mouth to get it wet, but now withdraws it. He tests Thor’s hypothesis by sliding the finger between Thor’s cheeks and pressing insistently in without pause. Thor lets out a shocky breath but does nothing else save lift his leg for better access. 

“Please,” says Thor again, as though he knows the word works better than magic on Loki. “You needn’t wait any longer.”

Loki considers this, removes his finger. “You _want_ me to hurt you?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Thor gasps out, and his whole massive body seems to tremble. “Make it rough, Loki. Don’t hold back, I beg of you.”

“Fuck, Thor.” Loki is hardly able to process what’s being asked of him, but his body processes much faster. His cock goes rock-hard at Thor’s request; a haze of lust seems to cloud his vision, narrowing it. He knocks Thor’s leg higher with his own leg before setting the head of his cock to Thor’s entrance and pushing inside without any further preparation. 

He has waited and wanted to do this since the birth of the universe, Loki realizes belatedly.

Thor’s body locks up, then just as fast relaxes, and he murmurs, “ _Yes,_ ” so Loki keeps going, thrusting insistently despite the lack of stretching or slicking first. There is only the remains of wet from Thor’s mouth on his cock, and the thought of that makes Loki groan and push harder. 

He groans, too, because Thor is impossibly tight around him, too tight. He groans because he is _fucking into Thor_ , and the mere comprehension of that, let alone the act, takes Loki’s breath and ability to reason away. When he’s far enough in, he snaps his hips forward, claiming Thor as deep and thoroughly as Thor took him the first time.

“ _Brother_ ,” Thor says, sounding broken apart, and the word is so intimate and somewhat uncalled for that Loki gives him another fierce thrust for it, then another, and another, and another, and another. Loki presses his face into the back of Thor’s shoulder, then realizes it would be far more satisfying to mark him there, and he offers Thor a sharp taste of his teeth as he speeds his hips.

 _Make it rough, Loki._ Loki does. The drag of his cock inside Thor is almost unbearable in its exquisite friction. He knows that Thor must feel pain from this, but Thor has asked for it, Thor has begged for it. Thor is pleading even now for more, so Loki digs his fingers into Thor’s thigh hard enough to bruise, hard enough to draw blood from the crescents of Loki’s fingernails, and Loki finds a deeper angle. 

Loki has never fucked anyone before, but he’s read and thought about it enough -- and if he is being truthful, which is rare, it is almost always with Thor that he’s imagined it. 

Yet he’s never pictured Thor like this, his back exposed to any attack Loki should care to deliver, the harsh sound of Thor’s escaping breath, Thor’s mighty body giving in to Loki’s onslaught and liking it. This is entirely new, and it is unexpected.

 _Make it rough, Loki._ Loki thinks about how Thor wants to be made to feel every part of this, and he thinks about Thor, who he unfortunately knows better than anyone else, and how Thor must always stand strong and tall and golden before the crowd, and be a faultless leader, and never appear to waver from his steadfast convictions. 

Thor doesn’t get to flinch at pain, or even acknowledge it. Thor cannot show vulnerability, turn his back to anyone else like this. Thor is desperate to be had, and to hurt, and to feel like he can be brought low and return from it.

Now that he understands, Loki smiles against Thor’s skin before biting much harder, and he slides his hand over Thor’s body. He teases Thor’s interested cock, but not nearly enough, and then he moves up, up, playing with and finally pinching Thor’s flat nipples, and that makes Thor combine a creative string of curses. Last, Loki’s questing hand closes around Thor’s throat, and he squeezes with enough pressure to mean it while he ruts into Thor with glorious, vicious strokes.

Thor gasps for air, and Loki only lets him have a little. “I’m going to make you spend for me like this,” Loki whispers in his ear, alerting Thor to his current plot. “No, you cannot touch yourself.” He tightens his hand on Thor’s throat until Thor obeys him. 

Thor has never _obeyed_ like this before, and the power quite goes to Loki’s head. Perhaps the same thought is crossing Thor’s mind, for a shiver travels down Thor’s spine -- Loki can feel it. Loki says, pointed, “All you get is my cock and my voice. Do you understand?”

Thor nods frantically, and Loki, pleased, nips at the soft bud of flesh at the base of Thor’s ear. He sets up a ragged rhythm, thrusting, until he can tell by Thor’s choked sound that he has hit upon the place inside of him that provides a greater pleasure. 

Then he drives his cock into Thor relentlessly, taking care to often hit that spot, and sometimes, not; and then Loki says, soft and silky, “I like this quite well, Thor, and I think I will have you like this again, and many other ways. But now I would have your body tell the truth: are you so shameless in your desire for me, that you’d let me into your bed -- knowing that the condition is that I can fuck you, all night should I choose, and you cannot touch me lest I say so?”

Thor is breathing erratically, struggling around Loki’s hand on his throat and Loki’s words, which succeed in making his cock twitch. Loki smiles and fucks him faster, faster. “An affirmative, I see. Ah, brother, I never would have thought you so full of secrets and surprises. But I will take pity on you,” Loki says. “I am not without pity, you know. I’ll tell you that I won’t demand such a pact, not every night at least, and that I may also spread my legs for you and let you split me open on your cock. But you will have to be _most_ persuasive, and sometimes, you will have to catch me and fight me before you can fuck me.”

Thor’s neck shifts under Loki’s hand as he throws his head back, his cock, untouched, leaking, then spilling all at once, so that Thor paints his belly until it glistens. Satisfied to have been so successful on his maiden voyage, Loki lets go his crushing hand, and even decides to press a kiss to Thor’s temple. 

With Thor taken care of, Loki turns his attention firmly to his own pleasure. He slows down, wanting to feel every inch of his cock sinking into Thor; he stays buried in him, unmoving, for a long time, burning the memory of it into his mind. When Loki at last lets himself unwind, it is pressed very deep, his hips making small, minute circles as he kisses along the bitemarks and blood bruises he has raised on Thor’s neck and shoulders. 

He tightens his arm around Thor, and wraps the other also over Thor’s chest, and it stuns Loki, in the end, how slow he goes, after all his filthy talk. But he goes slow, drawing it out, and when he spends within Thor, learns what it is like to fill him with his seed, the both of them exclaim about it, and Thor keeps saying his name, “Loki, _Loki_ ,” like it is a spell that Loki does not know.

Then they are still, though Loki is loath to move, so he does not. 

“Do that again,” Thor says. His voice is raw: gorgeous music to Loki’s ear.

Loki grins against Thor’s shoulder, rather pleased with himself, all things considered; but then he considers all things and he pulls out and away despite Thor’s protest. 

“Thor, let me see--” Loki tilts his chin up. Thor looks absolutely destroyed in the best possible fashion, his lip bit to bleeding, his color high, his expression dazed, his eyes --

“Blue,” Loki says aloud, nearly collapsing with relief. “Norns, _blue_. And mine?”

“Green,” Thor answers. “Green as the summer seas in the morning light by the cliffs of--”

Loki covers his mouth with a finger. “Shh, I have to look.” He shuts his summer-sea eyes to better extend his senses, and it is gone, _gone_ \-- there is not even a trace remaining of the cruel magics that bound them here. 

“We are free,” says Thor when Loki opens his eyes. Thor has been studying Loki’s face.

“Yes.” It’s been so many fraught and charged hours that Loki hardly knows what to do with himself now that their cage is lifted. Everything has changed since they entered the cave at a run. Absolutely everything is different. Their minds, their bodies, their brotherhood. Loki has the strange, uneasy feeling of not knowing himself before he girds against such foolishness.

Thor is the first to look away. Loki, who is comforted by direct lines of action, sets himself a series of tasks. First, he cleans them off with simple enough spellcraft, then he tries to tend to injuries with more complex healing magics. His knees are badly scraped from the first time that Thor took him, and his body aches in a hundred new and innovative ways.

But when he would turn his attention to Thor, Thor shakes his head. While Loki healed, Thor has gathered their scattered clothing and weaponry from around the cave, and he is half-dressed when Loki opens his eyes from his trance and offers to tend to Thor’s cuts and bruises. 

“I wish to remain as such,” says Thor, tugging on his shirt, which falls over the red lines that Loki’s nails drew down his back, the bites across his shoulder. His expression is shuttered as he watches the marks he made fade from Loki’s skin. 

Loki assumes an unaffected air, shrugs. Thor tosses him his helm. 

They dress in silence thereafter, save for when Loki hands Thor his belt, which was wedged against the cave wall, and Thor says, “Thank you.”

Suited up, weapons strapped on, nearly looking the same again, Loki could almost believe that none of it occurred. Can he really have been thrust inside Thor minutes ago? The idea is astounding from this angle, preposterous -- yet here they are, and there are the impressions of Loki’s fingers dug into the fine skin of Thor’s throat. 

They need to leave this place. This time Loki takes point -- he knows the sorcerer to be long gone by now, but if he’s left any magical traps in his wake, Loki will be damned if they’ll fall victim to another ploy. He scans the immediate area and sees nothing, save Thor beside him, glowing with light still diminished after he gave of himself at Loki’s behest. 

Loki is the first to exit the cave, breathing a sigh of pure relief when he passes into the open air. Never has a breeze felt better, or a step so liberating. Thor trails after, doing his own searches for more material traps. 

Then they find and regain the road. Many hours have passed, they have gone through a night and are approaching day. They have gone through trials unaccountable. 

The sun is slowly rising, casting a faint light, as though unwilling to illuminate the way for them.

After an hour or more of walking, each lost to their own thoughts, Thor says, “Did you mean what you said?”

Loki’s lips twitch. “What’s that, pray tell? I believe many things were said and done.”

“All of it,” says Thor. He’s staring straight ahead, his eyes on the road. His posture is too straight. “Any of it.”

“I might ask you the same,” Loki says, already annoyed with how the conversation is unfurling.

“I do not lie,” Thor says. But just as fast he tries to take it back: Loki can see how the choice of words recoils on him, and Thor winces. “I meant --”

“You meant that I do,” says Loki, letting ice into his tone. “It occurs to you that what I said and did, I did for the sake of expediency.” 

“I--”

“Don’t think of apologizing, _brother_ , it’s good to know how you truly think of me.”

Thor stops in the middle of the road, and when Loki would continue past, Thor seizes his wrist and will not let go, nor be shook free. Loki glares at him.

“Loki. Stop, please. Hear me. I only meant -- I must know how things are to be between us.”

“Well, why don’t you go first,” says Loki, not seeing any reason not to sound perfectly nasty. “How are _things_ with you, Thor?”

He should not have asked, Loki realizes a moment too late, for Thor is incapable of answering with anything save earnest honesty. Thor says, “Perhaps you would have us pretend as though what happened did not happen. But I cannot. I told you,” and now Thor steps closer before Loki can fall back, “when I had you the first time. I will have no other, now that I have known you.”

“That would bode ill for Asgard,” Loki says with a mocking smile, above the racing of his heart. His heart is set at a hard run. It gallops. “Seeing as how we cannot wed nor breed, and you must do both.” 

Thor’s face stays stubborn, set. His hand around Loki’s wrist is like iron. “When I am king, I may do as I please,” he says. 

“That will be many years yet,” Loki points out. Why is he even humoring this absurd conversation? 

“Many years,” Thor agrees, and his free hand comes up, palms Loki’s cheek, his thumb sliding soft against Loki’s skin. “Give me leave to pass them with you. I have always thought that we would fight together, side by side, for as much time as we are given. But no one can live on fighting alone.”

“I rather thought you’d been giving that a good go,” Loki says.

“I have tried,” Thor acknowledges, refusing to be baited. “It is not enough.”

“Well,” says Loki. “ _I_ was doing just fine on my own. I wanted for nothing. For no one.” He does not tell Thor that he existed in such a state because he thought who and what he wanted was forever out of reach. Even now, he is not wrong about that. “Be clear about what you’re asking, Thor. You want leave to seek my bed in secret. You want to hear me give you permission to skulk about in the night, and slip into my rooms like a thief, and slide between my legs, then be gone before the sun or anyone else catches you there.”

Thor stares at him, his expression unwavering, marble-carved. “Indeed,” he says slowly. “Though you know that is not all I desire. Set your terms and I will abide them. Make me crawl on my knees to you. Keep me on my knees. Use me thus. Only keep me, Loki.”

The thrill and fear of it spreads through Loki as a full-bodied shiver. He understands, then, how far this goes past wanton lust -- that it is as deep-rooted in Thor as it is in him, and perhaps it has been for as long. 

Could Thor have been jealous of Loki’s best-loved toys, of the first maid that Loki led out to dance, of the admirers that Loki let take his arm for strolls through the gardens? Thor was. He is. Loki looks into his brother’s eyes and sees only terrible truth there. Thor had said as much. _I am. Very jealous. Because you belong to me._

This is not Thor pleading for a continued dalliance because it is forbidden and thus exciting. This is Thor asking, offering himself, because he can conceive of no other way to go on after what they shared. 

Thor is poor at dissembling, has no facades that he hides behind. Loki knows himself capable of returning to the palace and taking up their former life as though they never spoke the words _you belong to me._ Certainly he’d not forget it, nor cease to be Thor’s shadow, but he would be able to pretend -- to tell himself and Thor -- that it was the spell alone that united them. 

Thor, however, has always lacked imagination. He will not be able to pretend, Loki thinks, without there being some greater mission at hand. He’ll stare at Loki without artifice, or make a grand, stupid gesture, or go off and get himself killed like the heroes in the most dramatic of his favorite stories. Perhaps he will manage to do all of those things at once.

Loki frowns, his eyebrows knit together as he thinks. Thor is looking at him, hardly breathing. 

Loki makes a decision. It is a precipitous step onto a new path that he watches appear, that he brings into being and knows there will be no returning from.

Loki says, “Here are my terms. No one can ever know what happened today, or anything that happens after. If anyone else is told or learns of it, it ends, and I will deny that it began to your face.” Thor nods, eager, but Loki holds up his hand. “You will not speak sentiment to me. No endearments, no softness. No declarations. We are not in a ballad, Thor. Or if we are, it is a particularly twisted one, that bards get banned for singing.” Thor opens his mouth; then, smartly, he closes it. Nods again. 

“We must be made to seem at odds, now and then,” Loki says, following his ingenious spark of inspiration until it lights a searing fire. “Else it will seem strange if you are ever at my side without a wife. You will show interest in women and court them. You will disagree and fight with me. Sometimes it will seem as though I have betrayed you. On occasion you will call me an enemy for all who would hear.”

Thor stops nodding. He looks shocked. “I could not,” he protests. “Brother, that is too much. I’ll not see you lose your place or your honor for the sake of a play-act.”

Loki lifts his chin. “I do not believe in honor, and my place is nothing that I would keep nor be kept by,” he says. He did not plan for this component of his terms, but as he speaks he knows that it is the truth, and the opportunity too immense to lose. “All my life I’ve looked in vain for a way out of it -- being the second son, neither heir nor free to live by my own will. This is my escape, Thor. Otherwise I’ll remain a prisoner of Asgard’s expectations, and how I measure up to or fail them, until I die.” 

Loki looks Thor full in the eyes. Excitement threatens to overwhelm him, but he does not flinch; he explains how they will succeed. “Let us instead plot that sometimes, we will seem to hate each other, so that I might shape a different life for myself on my own terms -- one that I can also share with you as we desire. I promise that I will always come back even if exiled, and you, in your beneficence, will forgive me, and restore me to a place of your choosing when that right is yours.”

Thor stares at him for a long while. “I did not know that you felt that way about your role. Surely you know you are invaluable to me--”

“Then show me how much,” Loki says. He folds his arms across his chest. “Those are my terms.”

“And if I cannot agree?”

Loki shrugs, as though it matters little either way. He shrugs to mask that his hands, his whole body is trembling to know that he is on the verge of achieving all that he has aspired to in his wildest dreams: Thor in his bed, and freedom to live his own life outside of it. “We go back to what we were before the cave. No more, no less.”

“We are too young to make decisions or plans like this,” Thor tries, uncertain.

“Says the man negotiating for the exclusive right to my bed,” says Loki, not budging, though he lifts an eyebrow. He does not add _forever_ ; he rather thinks he doesn’t need to.

He watches the full weight of his words hit Thor like a well-aimed attack. It lands as a body blow. “You would deny any other?” Thor says quickly, voice hushed as though if he speaks too loud, Loki might be startled into changing his mind. 

It’s an easy enough thing for Loki to swear, but Thor does not know that. It should be overwhelming, to see how persuasive the force of Thor’s desire for him is, how possessive, the way it washes away all else. But it is not, for Loki has felt the same way since he first hid Thor’s prized stuffed horse away where it was never to be recovered. 

“Yes,” says Loki. “And welcome you, brother.”

“Then I agree to your terms,” says Thor. He does not hesitate now, and his eyes, his expression, his whole broad self is sincere. 

Loki’s heart leaps wildly in his breast. He wants to smile, and so he does, slow and almost tender as he regards Thor, who stares back, grinning himself and seeming dazed. “You are truly awful at negotiation,” Loki tells him.

“I have all that I want,” says Thor, and he steps into Loki’s space and puts his arms around him, breathes in Loki’s air. 

“Sentiment,” tsks Loki, but he lets Thor kiss him. The improvement in kissing from the first clash of their mouths hours before is remarkable -- is astounding, really. He loops his arms around Thor’s neck and lets himself be lost, a moment, in the embrace. 

When they return, and in all the days thereafter, there will be time to put the other pieces of Loki’s plan in motion. It will take a long time. Years. Centuries. A millennia. But they will succeed. Loki will see to it that they do.

Thor must be trained to be a much better actor. They must act it out again and again until Thor can convincingly grab him with violence and yell of Loki’s betrayal. Thor will be taught to throw him down as though he means it. Thor will be able to look into Loki’s eyes with total conviction and say, fiercely, _Come home!_ and Loki will laugh and relent, eventually. 

Oh, it will be delicious. The plan propels Loki into passionate abandon faster than an enchantment. He holds Thor tighter to him, deepens the kiss.

“You know,” hums Loki when Thor breaks off to kiss his neck, “you promised me a pillar at the palace upon our return, where anyone might see. But perhaps you are such a brute in the end you cannot wait even for that, and must substitute a tree by the roadside.”

“I _am_ feeling rather brutish,” Thor concurs, his eyes lit up and wonderfully his own again: blue and intent and focused on Loki’s mouth. He starts to walk Loki backwards, back and back, until Loki hits bark and is bracketed in by Thor’s arms.

Loki continues the narrative. “Though I protest that this road is frequented by merchants, and that perhaps even now a search party from Asgard seeks us, you care not. You say that you must have me, and you lift me up right here, and you ravish me.”

“And you?” Thor asks, his hands already travelling down Loki’s body to gain purchase on Loki’s thighs, and then he pulls Loki up and into the air as though he weighs nothing at all. “What do you do, while I ravish?”

“At first, I struggle, though it is of no use,” Loki says, breathing quickly now. “At last I yield, and I tell you that if you must have me, to go hard and be quick about it, lest we be found.”

“I must have you,” echoes Thor. “But I will not be quick. No; I believe I will fuck you against this tree until it begins to grow around you.”

“ _Thor_ \--”

“By our terms, I am not allowed to speak to you of my sentiment,” says Thor, as he begins to tug at Loki’s buckles and clasps. “But I am permitted to show you, and I intend to demonstrate the depth of what I feel, Loki. It is very deep.”

“Ah,” says Loki, surprised into a flush, and for once one-upped at his own game. “That is -- creative of you. A fascinating interpretation of our agreement.”

Thor’s eyebrows climb. “Do you wish to alter the terms?”

“Not for the world, brother,” Loki says. They are trapped anew, Loki thinks; it will be impossible to separate them now. But this cage is of their own making. Loki lets himself be caught, and gladly, for he designed the snare. “Not for the world.”

When they return to Asgard, there are still leaves in Loki’s hair, and his back is crisscrossed with scratches that, to an observing eye, make an exact impression of tree-bark. This time, Loki doesn’t heal them away, but keeps the marks on his skin, under his shirt, like a signed contract. 

Later that night, Thor will trace the marks with his tongue, which is even better than a signature, and more binding than any spell.

**Author's Note:**

> You are lovely for being here. Come on over to my [tumblr](http://et-in-arkadia.tumblr.com) and tell me secrets.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I walked dark through cities I hate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13455798) by [lowsywriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lowsywriter/pseuds/lowsywriter)




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